This is Amelia Rayno's third season on the Gophers men's basketball beat. She learned college basketball in North Carolina (Go Tar Heels!), where fanhood is not an option. In 2010, she joined the Star Tribune after graduating from Boston's Emerson College, which sadly had no exciting D-I college hoops to latch onto. Amelia has also worked on the sports desk at the Boston Globe and interned at the Detroit News.

*I think UCLA is about as good a matchup as the Gophers could hope for considering their seeding. The other three 6 seeds are Arizona, Butler and Memphis. Butler and Memphis would have been decent matchups as well, but the Bruins are very much a team in flux now, after losing their best player to a broken foot. UCLA fell, 78-69 to Oregon in the Pac-12 tournament title on Saturday night after coming within six points late in the contest. They shot 60 percent from 3-point range and 44.6 from the field in that game, but turned the ball over 14 times and managed just 27 rebounds.

*This will be the Gophers’ 12th NCAA tournament appearance (three of those, however, were later vacated). It will be the third in the Tubby Smith era. The Gophers have not won an NCAA tournament game with Smith at the helm. It will be Smith’s 17th trip to the Big Dance overall in his 22 seasons as a head coach. Smith led Kentucky to a national championship in 1998.

*If the Gophers advance past UCLA, they will face the winner of No. 3 Florida and No. 14 Northwestern State on Sunday.

*Smith said he plans to stand pat on the team’s lineup and wide bench as the Gophers head into the tournament on an 0-3 run. “We’ll play the way we usually play,” he said. “There’s not a whole lot more we can change at this point in time. We’re going to play the people we have and the people we’ve been playing.”